1) If I believe my friends, which I do, the particle physics and astronomy funding has been slashed by 25%, not because of a conscious policy to spend the money on other things, but because of an admin fuck-up. There is a petition here, and a facebook group here (although the latter seems more aimed at young physicists than, err, anyone that wants to help and is interested, which I think is a mistake)

2) Go and vote on the NHS website about whether they should censor the genatalia on a "how your body works" diagram.

*Or make yourself feel better by shouting about bad things while achieving very little, I'm not sure.

Well, I'm never quite sure what I'm allowed to do - being a civil servant I have to abide to certain bits of the civil service code that limits what I can do politically, and no-one can tell me whether this means I can sign petitions against things the government / NHS is doing. But I'm pretty sure I can tell people that such things exist ;-)

Which is, of course, pretty-much how the Samaritans got founded: Chad Varah had to officiate at the funeral of a parisioner, a girl who'd committed suicide because she thought the blood coming from between her legs meant she had cancer.

It always astonishes me to find out that family-walking-around-the-house-naked is somehow bad evil and wrong, because, er, it's what we do. (Where some of the rest of the family lives on a nudist colony. Um.)

I understood that the particle physics and astronomy funding hadn't been cut at all, it's just that the research council had spent the money on something else. This seems to me to be a problem with the research council, not a problem with the government. Of course it's a problem for physicists, and there's an argument that the government should bail them out, although there's also a contrary argument that if you bail people out when they overspend, then they'll always overspend.

AIUI there were two research councils, the one with the overspend and the one that does astronomy etc. And the government wanted them to merge, and the one that does astronomy etc said "but they have a large overspend, we don't want to merge with them in case it affects us". And the government said "Don't worry. We'll guarentee it won't affect you, now merge with the other research council like we want you to". And then the government forgot to put the money into the joint pot to fulfil the guarentee. Or something like that. But it is all urban legend and folk rumour I have heard.